On topic of SLS, and Mars Sample Return, and the upcoming new space telescope: here is NASA on a roadmap to asteroid-mining. The paper, naïvely perhaps, sees a spiral of costs, which it amusingly illustrates, and hopes to invert it to a spiral of savings, as one advance on the way allows for infrastructure creating opportunities for the next advance.
The paper bears a strong musk of PowerPoint, October 2017. However: now we have a reusable SuperHeavy and, maybe next week, reusable Starship.
The tech-aim here is the "Honey Bee", extraction of water and other volatiles from a NEO, preferably polanoid. Also to capture a large rock, or at least to pull ice-blocks from one; and run the material into Lunar Distant Retrograde Orbit. We don't do the Lunar Gateway in this scenario, but last I heard Elon is likely to kill it anyway.
BACKDATE 11/17
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